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Legacy System

To celebrate the launch of the Legacy system, SWTOR is giving players a free month of game time to the account of anyone who's had a level 50 character as of April 12, 12pm CDT. For non-level 50 players, the condition for free gametime states that the player must unlock his Legacy by the end of Chapter 1 and proceeds to Legacy Level 6 by April 22 at 1pm EDT.

For more information on the whole Legacy promotion, go to the official page.

Patch 1.2, which went live in April 2012, introduced a new Legacy System that allows players to create family trees of characters. Once the first character completes act one of their class quest, you'll be able to create a Legacy Last Name. This surname will be shared across all characters on that server. Like the name you gave your character, the last name must also be unique.

Getting to level 50 will unlock that character's race for all classes you create thereafter, bypassing the regular class and race restrictions. This means that if you were to play a character to level 50 with all the races, you can choose any race to be any class, forgoing the initial restrictions.

You don't have to actually do it for all races, as some of the race unlocks can be purchased through in-game currency. For unlocking new skills, you'll still need to level a class to 50.

To make things clear, the Legacy system is designed to give great benefits to alternate characters, not your current level 50. So be sure to mail the Legacy construction kit to an alt, as it is useless to your level 50 character.

Through the Legacy system, you can mix and match a certain class' innate skill with another class' innate skill -- with some limitations, of course. For example, a Bounty Hunter that can shoot Force Lightning can be entirely possible. All you have to do is relate a Bounty Hunter to a level 50 Sith Inquisitor.

But your Bounty Hunter won't suddenly become a true force-wielder. Every class has a heroic moment ability which requires the presence of a Companion to activate. Only by using these heroic moment abilities will you be able to access the cross-class Legacy abilities.

That essentially means you can only use the abilities out in the questing world; Legacy abilities won't work in a full group or in a Warzone, most likely.

Legacy vendors will be located at your Capital planets and will offer new weapons and armor sets for your alts. However, these special vendors only take a new special token that can be found as random loot or certain quest rewards.